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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27063451">Their hungry thirsty roots</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/afterism/pseuds/afterism'>afterism</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Goblin Market - Christina Rossetti</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Gen, Horror, Trick or Treat: Trick</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 21:40:37</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>750</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27063451</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/afterism/pseuds/afterism</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>A goblin market must travel.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>43</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Trick or Treat Exchange 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Their hungry thirsty roots</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/reeby10/gifts">reeby10</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Thank you for the opportunity to explore the goblins' world! 🎃</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <i>i. Along whichever road they took</i>
</p><p>The goblins do not follow the roads men make. A goblin's map of the earth would be incomprehensible to human eyes; a tangle of connections, of leaps spanning oceans, of curious gaps.</p><p>Here's the truth: They can walk wherever the moonlight touches. A goblin can take a step spanning furlongs as the same silver light paints his shadow. They follow the glint of rivers and the babble of brooks; wherever the song of the water is the same they can splash in from one bank and jump out a hundred miles hence.</p><p>The goblins know a tree is always linked to its offspring, no matter how far the seeds go. They can swing from mother to daughter, from branch to branch across continents, across seas. They can traipse among treetops as easily as they scurry through the ground, using the tunnels of badgers and moles and strange, squirming things, emerging like mushrooms wherever the earth gives way. </p><p>The goblins can, if it is the shortest route, even use the paths laid by men, but those are rarely the quickest.</p><p>Any creature watching would think they missed the goblins' arrival; that they were looking in the wrong direction, that they were distracted for a moment by the fluttering of a bird. The goblins don't appear from thin air - it's simply that no one else can see the ground where the goblin took his previous step.</p><p> </p><p>
  <i>ii. (Men sell not such in any town)</i>
</p><p>The goblins have many gifts. They pluck languages from lands as easily as berries from bushes - all creatures, humans and all, use their mouths for both speaking and eating. The goblins learn their food and find speech on their tongues. </p><p>They squabble with foxes and argue with owls, scoffing and snarling and mocking and barking at the animals who have no taste for their fine fruits and nothing of interest to trade. They jostle with elbows and paws and muzzles and tails, poisoning the air and marking the trails; they carve out their routes and their glens, travelling where stories of them have not yet reached, or where they have become myths, old wives tales that the young folk dismiss.</p><p>Sometimes there's a clever one, who finds the second taste the antidote to the first; but usually the years turn and the myths become warnings and the goblins are chased away with stones and sticks and fire, the glens burnt down, the brooks filled with rocks. It rarely matters - the graveyards are full and brown and lush underneath the earth.</p><p>There's the truth: those who buy and eat and drink their fill of the goblins' fruit 'til nothing else can satisfy them waste away, all the better for their bodies to draw the fertile loam close as they rot.</p><p>(They would suffer so much less if only they laid down in the dirt and closed their eyes as soon as they were full; but, the men are strange like that.)</p><p> </p><p>
  <i>iii. Where summer ripens at all hours</i>
</p><p>Here's the secret: the goblins know how to trap sunlight in their baskets and their bowls, and in the golden hair of maidens, and in the yearning flesh of corpses.</p><p>Deep underground, down so far that heat rises from beneath their paws as they scurry helter-skelter, there is a single tree. Its roots are uncountable, its branches infinite, and all its fruits are white and formless like grubs until plucked by a goblin's hand and packed carefully for the journey up to hungry, waiting mouths.</p><p>Its roots feed on lost rivers and the things the goblins tuck between them, on ancient soil and dust-smeared muslin, on borrowed light and empty lungs. It's all green and brown and gold, to those with the eyes for seeing in such unsullied darkness. Its trunk glitters with the treasures of trade and conquest, with the offerings of ancient civilisations, with moss and orchids and tiny slugs.</p><p>The goblins are not cramped together, down there in the earth. There are rooms and caves and sempiternal hollows, steps stolen from ruined castles, vast beams and arches carved from the great roots of greater trees, long dead. Like beetles they chitter and scutter through the concursion of roots and bones and branches, across twisting limbs and swollen bark, clucking and calling and tending their tree.</p><p>(The soil shifts beneath their feet sometimes, as wet leaves sprout from fingertips. The goblins know the tree must grow, or the world above would fall down.)</p>
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